Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (20 page)

When a caller to Beck’s radio show in August 2009 expressed his frustration that his congressman wasn’t attending his Tea Party gathering, Beck suggested: “Hold a meeting in front of their house if you have to … Hold these people responsible. If you know they go shopping on Saturday at Safeway, get in the parking lot at Safeway.” Another time, he told his followers to come to Washington and “look ’em in the whites of their eyes.” If that wasn’t clear, he added: Things are “coming to a point where the people will have exhausted all their options. When that happens, look out. Look out.”

Beck gives his audience every reason to be desperate. “We are a country that is headed towards socialism, totalitarianism, beyond your wildest imagination,” he warns them. And: “Anti-God forces are aligning themselves all over the world and here at home.” And: “These guys have to worry about the bullets put into their backs by our politicians.”

It sounds like a call to fight back by any means necessary—but of course Beck is often cautioning his followers to follow Gandhi’s admonition to use “truth as your anvil” and warning them that “just one lunatic like Timothy McVeigh could ruin everything.”

But how does somebody become Timothy McVeigh? Beck himself offered an interesting view on this, in a conversation with Fox’s Bill O’Reilly. The two were discussing a gunman who killed ten people and himself in an Alabama shooting spree. “Here is a guy who felt that he had been wronged … He was disgruntled and everything else, and then he went out and shot a bunch of people,” Beck explained. “But as I’m listening to him, I’m thinking about the American people that feel disenfranchised right now, that feel like nobody’s hearing their voice. The government isn’t hearing their voice … If you’re a conservative, you are called a racist, you want to starve children, yada, yada, yada. They’re—and every time they do speak out, they are shut down by political correctness. How do you not have those people turn into that guy?”

Beck had just suggested that the government, with political correctness, was turning Americans into mass murderers.

“Well, look,” O’Reilly intervened. “Nobody, even if they’re frustrated, is going to hurt another human being unless they’re mentally ill, I think.”

Beck thought otherwise. “If they’re pushed to the wall, you don’t think people get pushed to the wall?”

“No, I don’t believe in the snap thing,” O’Reilly said. “I think that kind of violence is inside you and it’s a personality disorder.”

It’s a fascinating question: Will otherwise normal people “snap” if they are made to feel pushed to the wall? Beck, at 5
P.M
. each weekday, seems determined to test the hypothesis.

In July 2010, an unemployed carpenter named Byron Williams, pulled over for erratic driving in Oakland, California, got in a shootout with police with his 9mm handgun, shotgun, and .309-caliber rifle with armor-piercing bullets. Captured after injuring two officers, the parolee told investigators that he wanted “to start a revolution” by “killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.” His mother, Janice, told the
San Francisco Chronicle
that her son had been watching television news and was upset by “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.”

And what television news show could have directed the troubled man’s ire toward the obscure Tides Foundation? There was only one. “Tides was one of the hardest things that we ever tried to explain, and everyone told us that we couldn’t,” Beck boasted to his radio listeners a week after the shooting. “The reason why the blackboard really became what the blackboard is, is because I was trying to explain Tides and how all of this worked.” He savored the fact that “no one knew what Tides was until the blackboard.” For good measure, Beck went after Tides again on Fox the next four nights.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been completed on schedule—and quite possibly not at all—without the heroic efforts of Emily Kotecki. Glenn Beck has a whole squad of researchers, but all of them combined don’t have the talent of Emily, my former colleague at the
Washington Post
, who spent hours combing the Web and transcribing Beck oddities and ironies. Her work and mine were made easier by the hundreds of hours of recordings of Beck’s TV and radio shows posted online by the many organizations Beck most loves to hate, particularly Media Matters for America.

I am profoundly grateful to Bill Thomas, editor in chief at Doubleday, who, owing to some inexplicable lapse in his otherwise excellent judgment, continues to publish my work. He saw the potential for this book in a 750-word column I wrote, strengthened me when I wavered, and, together with his able assistant Coralie Hunter, magically threaded my musings into a cohesive and at times coherent narrative. My agent, the inimitable Rafe Sagalyn, is the one who married my inchoate wish to write about the coarsening political discourse with a focus on the phenomenon that is Beck.

My research benefited from the suggestions of many journalistic colleagues, particularly a brave few at Fox News who gave me a sense of Beck from the inside (and who, for reasons of job preservation, will not be named here). This book should not be seen as a screed against Fox; I have worked with many first-rate correspondents and producers at the network, and they more than anybody have suffered because of Beck. I have appeared on Fox in the past as a commentator and would gladly do so again in the unlikely event I get the call.

I appreciate the willingness of Marcus Brauchli, Liz Spayd, and the other editors on the news side of the
Washington Post
to let me undertake this project. I am indebted to Fred Hiatt and his staff on the editorial side of the
Post
for inviting me to write a regular op-ed column. This new form has expanded my thinking and allowed me to explore a broader range of topics—leading to a column titled “The Beck Effect” in January 2010 that was the genesis of this book.

I extend my thanks to friends and family who tolerated (or, perhaps, enjoyed) my disappearance from civilization these last several months. Above all, I thank the two most important people in my life, my wife, Donna, and my daughter, Paola, for their patience, support, and love during the many nights and weekends I spent producing this book. They are my sustenance on good days and bad days—and, should Beck turn out to be correct, there is nobody I’d rather be with on doomsday.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dana Milbank is a syndicated columnist with the
Washington Post
and, formerly, a prizewinning White House reporter. He is the author of three books, including the national bestseller
Homo Politicus
. He has also provided commentary for CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR. He received a B.A. in political science cum laude from Yale in 1990. He lives in Washington with his wife and daughter.